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Bernard Comrie (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig) Session 105Endangered numeral systems of the Americas & their theoretical relevanceRecent work on documention of indigenous numeral systems of the Americas, on endangered numeral systems, and on the theory andtypology of numeral systems suggests both that such indigenous numeral systems are highly endangered--often more so than thelanguages to which they belong--and that important insights into the general theory of numeral systems depend crucially on input fromthese languages. I discuss some key examples to illustrate this point and to emphasize the particular urgency of documentingindigenous numeral systems.Jessica Coon (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Session 95Right specifiers vs V-movement: VOS in CholBasic word order in most Mayan languages is VOS. Previous proposals (e.g. Aissen 1992) achieve VOS by parameterizing specifierheadorder. Such accounts, however, fail to explain certain strong restrictions on objects in VOS constructions. I argue that allspecifiers in Chol precede their heads and that VOS order is the result of obligatory verb raising coupled with incorporation of an NPobject. This analysis both explains the object restrictions as well as other word order facts and also situates Chol in a larger pattern ofpro-drop languages which have been argued to satisfy the EPP via verb raising.Jennifer Cornish (University at Buffalo, State University of New York) Session 21The acoustics of unstressed vowels in pitch-cued stress languagesThe possible independence of shortened vowel duration and lessened articulatory effort in phonetic vowel reduction poses aninteresting question for languages that are not reported to use duration as a main acoustic correlate of stress. To investigate hownecessary shortened duration is to the process of phonetic vowel reduction, the current study investigates the relationship between theacoustic realization of stress and the presence of phonetic reduction in unstressed vowels in Polish. Analyses examine voweldurations, reduction and rates of spectral change at different levels of stress and in different prominence positions.Rebecca T. Cover (University of California, Berkeley) Session 28The semantics of aspect in BadiarankeI analyze the semantics of two aspectual constructions in Badiaranke (Atlantic, Niger-Congo) with surprising distributions: theperfective/stative and the imperfective. With non-stative verbs, the perfective/stative denotes a completed or terminated event; withstative verbs, it denotes an ongoing state. The imperfective, unsurprisingly, may express either habitual or progressive semantics;unexpectedly, it is also used to make assertions about the future. I argue that the perfective/stative cannot be assigned a unifiedsemantics, but that all three types of imperfective clauses do have a common semantic core. Finally, I propose a historical explanationfor the synchronic division of the semantic space.Thera Crane (University of California, Berkeley) Session 47The force of o-: Left periphery interactions in OshiwamboWord-initial o- in the Bantu language Oshiwambo (Guthrie R.20) cliticizes onto a variety of constituents, including most positivemain clause verbs, subject and focus-fronted object question words, and focused nouns. The syntax and semantics of o- have beentreated in a number of works (Halme 2006, Fivaz 1984, et al.), but no unified analysis has been proposed. I argue that an analysis ofo- as the phonological instantiation of a force feature (as described in Rizzi 1997) both accounts for the wide range of data andpredicts what is otherwise a puzzling distribution of resumptive pronouns in relative clauses.Megan J. Crowhurst (University of Texas, Austin) Session 97Monica Macaulay (University of Wisconsin, Madison)On Karuk accentBright 1957 identifies three classes of lexically-specified accent--circumflex (falling tone on long vowels), acute (high), and low. Weshow that the distribution of accent is predictable. Circumflex accent is analyzed as floating HL: H docks to the first mora of therightmost long V, and if there is none, to the initial syllable, with L on the next syllable. Such initial H association on short Vs createsspurious acutes. In real acute accent words, H is assigned to the penultimate syllable when no tone is present underlyingly. Wegenerate low tone by associating lexically specified Ls to final syllables.113